The Aviators: Eddie Rickenbacker, Jimmy Doolittle, Charles Lindbergh (31 page)

Undaunted, and needing to recoup some of the cash he had lost, on behalf of Shell, Doolittle entered a much-publicized cross-country race sponsored by the Bendix Aviation Corporation, which held out a $7,500 prize for the winner.
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Billed as the Transcontinental Free-for-All Speed Dash, the eight racers, including Doolittle, would take off after midnight from Burbank, California, and the first one to cross the finish line at Cleveland, Ohio, before seven p.m. that same day would be the winner. In a straight line it was 2,046 miles.

Doolittle arranged for refueling stops in Albuquerque and Kansas City where Shell crews were prepared to service the plane with 140 gallons of gas in under ten minutes. Doolittle figured that would shave off enough time to give him an edge.

He was flying a plane made by the aviation designer E. M. “Matty” Laird, called the Laird Super Solution. Doolittle figured it would average about 200 miles per hour to Cleveland. His opponents included a Hollywood stunt pilot, a stockbroker, an airline pilot, an army captain, and a retired barnstormer with the delightful name of Beeler Blevins.
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The contestants took off shortly after one a.m. Pacific Time, with each pilot choosing his own route, speed, fuel stops, and altitude. At Albuquerque, Doolittle barely had time to drink a glass of milk that someone handed him before the Super Solution was fueled full by the Shell “pit crew” and ready for takeoff.

He made the Kansas City airfield three hours and five minutes later, averaging 228 miles per hour, and won the Bendix Trophy with a record flight time of nine hours and ten minutes to Cleveland. Joe and the boys were waiting for him on the airfield, but after a brief reunion Jimmy refueled and took off again for New York, where an additional $2,500 awaited him for completing that leg of the flight. He crossed the Alleghenies in a rain squall and landed at Newark before five in the evening—coast to coast in eleven hours and eleven minutes, beating the old record by a full hour. With $10,000 in cash prizes, he’d made up in full for the loss of the Mystery Ship.

B
Y THE BEGINNING OF THE 1930S
Shell Oil was selling more than twenty million gallons of aviation fuel a year, mostly to private pilots, and there was even a feeling among the population that the airplane might actually supersede the automobile as the principal means of personal transportation. At world’s fairs in Chicago and elsewhere, exhibits portrayed modern cities with personal airplanes flying all over the skies. Commercial airlines were just beginning to catch on as well. The Depression slowed but did not stop production of aircraft, nor the sale of aviation fuel.

There were many advanced engine designs, but the more powerful the engines became, the more they tended to blow or burn out their pistons. If aircraft were to fly heavier loads faster, they were going to need increasing power, but first the piston problem needed to be solved. Doolittle summed it up this way: “More powerful engines would demand better aviation fuel.”

Pilots had long known that there was a difference in fuels. They called it the “knock rating,” before the term “octane rating” was coined, because a low-grade fuel would cause any internal combustion engine—car, plane, motorbike—to “knock.” Scientists both in the United States and abroad were studying the problem and at last came up with tetraethyl lead as a gasoline additive to reduce knock in an engine. It worked but was more expensive. Soon there were eighteen different grades of fuels, ranging from 65 octane to the standard 87 octane used by most commercial airlines. Doolittle was for standardizing these into three or four grades, but most of all he pushed Shell to manufacture 100 octane aviation fuel.

It would be the fuel of the future, he told executives, because he’d studied the new engine designs and all of them called for far more powerful engines than were in existence at the time. Military planes, fighters and bombers, Doolittle argued, would soon be built with extremely powerful engines, and the same was true for commercial aircraft, which by the early 1930s were being designed to carry up to twenty-one passengers instead of the present six or eight.

Shell was convinced enough by Doolittle’s argument to put $3 million into research and development for the 100 octane fuel, the demand for which at the time was absolutely zero.
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Doolittle took much criticism from various naysayers and disbelievers in the company, who behind his back branded it “Doolittle’s Folly.” In fact, his standing within the company was on the line, and he knew it.

The first hurdle Doolittle had with selling the 100 octane fuel was the U.S. Army, which had solved the multifuel grade problem by designing all its military engines from motorcycles to fighter planes so they would use a single-grade fuel (87 octane). It was believed that this would simplify supply problems in wartime.

Doolittle organized and closely monitored tests of various grades of fuel conducted by the Air Corps at Wright Field in Ohio, where engineers made an amazing discovery: using 100 octane fuel would increase power even in existing engines up to 30 percent, and that with high-compression engines the higher-grade fuel would get up to 15 percent in fuel savings.

Jimmy made his case to the army brass and in 1936 a committee was appointed that recommended all combat aircraft engines be designed for 100 octane fuel. The commercial airlines didn’t need a committee, and by 1938 Shell Oil was selling millions of gallons of high-octane fuel monthly. By 1943, with the war on, Shell was producing fifteen million gallons of 100 octane
a day
. It had been a big gamble, and Jimmy had risked his career with Shell over it, but “Doolittle’s Folly” paid off in spades.

Meantime, Jimmy announced he was retiring from air racing. He had been gravitating toward the decision for years, gently pushed by Joe, as so many of his friends and acquaintances had died in crashes. He was the number one air-racing pilot in America, but he was also thirty-four and balding, and his happy smile was beginning to look rueful. What finally pushed him into retirement was when he learned that during his last race, a Thompson Cup, news photographers had clustered around Joe and the children, hoping to capture the looks on their faces if he crashed.

The air races, he told the press, had served their purpose. They aroused public interest and created great innovations in aircraft design such as retractable landing gear, streamlined wings, and of course more powerful engines. But now, he said, the emphasis should be on reliability and safety. When pressed on the decision, he told reporters, “I have yet to hear of anyone engaged in this work dying of old age.”

Very soon afterward, the Curtiss company came calling once more, wanting Doolittle to make a trip around the world to sell its P6 Hawk, in conjunction with Shell Oil, of course. He took Joe along this time—after arranging for the boys to be cared for—and sailed from San Francisco in early 1933, arriving nearly a month later in Yokohama, Japan. Jimmy immediately became a subject of suspicion when the Japanese saw his passport, but he was allowed ashore anyway to visit Tokyo and sightsee other areas. He wrote later that if he’d had any inkling that the United States would one day soon be at war with Japan he would have taken careful notes of landmarks and military targets.

Jimmy gave demonstrations of the Hawk in several Chinese cities, including Shanghai; each time he noticed on the outskirts of the field a group of Japanese photographers with telescopic lenses taking pictures of the military plane. Twice he had strong misgivings that a saboteur had tampered with the plane and damaged critical parts. They pushed on to the Philippines without further incident, making brief stops in the Dutch East Indies, the Middle East, and Europe, before sailing back to New York from England in August 1933.

While he was in England, Jimmy had made a determined pitch to the Royal Air Force, pointing out the extra power boost its planes—especially the defensive fighters—would get by converting to 100 octane gas. He showed British engineers that a 1,000-horsepower-rated Merlin fighter engine would produce 1,700 horsepower when fueled with 100 octane gasoline. This gave the RAF an enormous edge during the Battle of Britain, when its Hurricanes and Spitfires could develop much higher manifold pressure and outclimb and outrace their German counterparts, which used only 87 octane fuel.
⁸

Because Doolittle’s words did not fall on deaf ears, by the middle of 1940 all RAF fighters had begun to use 100 octane fuel, and after the war the British petroleum secretary said of the conversion: “This octane was thirteen points higher than the fuel used by German aircraft. Those extra thirteen points ended the threat of any Nazi invasion of England.”
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I
N
F
EBRUARY 1934
, a significant and expanding scandal erupted when, in answer to charges of favoritism, President Franklin D. Roosevelt without warning canceled all airmail contracts with civilian airline companies and nationalized the airmail service by ordering the Army Air Corps to fly the mail. The president’s action stemmed from his assertion that the major airlines, with the collusion of his Republican predecessor’s administration, had criminally conspired to keep all mail contracts within their own hands and nobody else’s.

This provoked severe and biting criticism of the president by such aviation luminaries as Eddie Rickenbacker and Charles Lindbergh. Lindbergh, still famous for his transatlantic flight and a large stockholder in TWA, one of the affected airlines, was never a man to mince words. The day following the announcement, he sent Roosevelt a personal telegram, simultaneously released to the press, charging that the president’s action would “unnecessarily damage all American aviation,” and condemning the president for taking arbitrary action against the airlines without a fair trial.
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Rickenbacker, who by then was also inextricably involved with the airline industry, was even more strident. After Lindbergh’s comments were printed, reporters rushed over to Rickenbacker’s New York office to get a comment. He explained that army pilots were not suited to flying the mail. They were neither trained nor equipped for blind flying or even night flying. Their planes were not adapted to airmail flying. Pointing out that no chief pilot for a commercial airline had less than four thousand flying hours, compared with a few hundred for the average army pilot, he told the newsmen, “Either they [the army pilots] are going to pile up ships all across the continent, or they are not going to be able to fly the mail on schedule.”

The Roosevelt administration had already developed a highly skilled attack organ within its public relations machine. In an obvious case of “if you don’t like the message, attack the messenger,” Roosevelt’s secretary Stephen T. Early immediately accused Lindbergh of, basically, being ungentlemanly for releasing his telegram to the press before Roosevelt had had a chance to read it himself.

Not only that, but prominent Democratic congressmen began attacking Lindbergh in the press, accusing him of being a publicity seeker, a shill for the airlines, and there were assertions hinting of bribery and corruption. It was Lindbergh’s first encounter with adverse publicity, but if he was stung by it he didn’t say. It would not be his last difficult encounter with the Roosevelt administration.

The army was scheduled to begin flying the mail by February 20. By then, all of the commercial airlines had practically gone out of business, since carrying airmail had been their mainstay, and there wasn’t yet enough passenger traffic to keep the companies going. Staff and workers were laid off to cope with the Depression however they could. On that same morning, newspaper headlines announced that three army pilots had been killed the previous day flying in snowstorms or fog, merely
on their way
to their airmail assignments. Rickenbacker was having breakfast with several reporters when the newspapers were brought in, and he abruptly declared, “That’s legalized murder!” When the reporters asked if they could quote him, America’s Ace of Aces said, “You’re damned right you can!”
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He had been scheduled to give a fifteen-minute nationwide speech on NBC several days later and had asked the
Los Angeles Times
publisher Harry Chandler for help “from his best editorial writer” to weigh in on the airmail controversy. As he was leaving for the studio, Rickenbacker said, he received a call from a friend at NBC who informed him that “orders had come from Washington [i.e., presumably from the White House] to cut me off the air if I said anything controversial.”

Rickenbacker toned down his speech, but not enough to keep from being cut off entirely several days later, he said, by orders of the president, when he was scheduled to make another speech via NBC’s national radio forum.
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Just as Lindbergh and Rickenbacker had predicted, in the ensuing weeks there were sixty-six crashes and ten more army pilots were killed delivering the mail, provoking a public outcry that at last caused Roosevelt to reverse himself and put the airmail service back on commercial airline contracts. But the president, in a final fit of pique, decreed that no one who worked for any of the original companies that had traditionally carried the mail would be eligible to receive a government contract. This produced a charade of musical chairs in which all the airlines simply changed their names (e.g., United Aircraft became United Airlines), a solution that Lindbergh sourly characterized as “something to be found in
Alice in Wonderland
.”
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Instead of speaking out like Lindbergh and Rickenbacker, Doolittle kept his counsel during the controversy, though privately he shared the opinion of Lindbergh and Rickenbacker that the president had been imprudent in making army pilots fly airmail routes. Perhaps his silence was because he was trying to sell the government 100 octane gasoline.